Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

While it has you in its grip initially, it gradually loses its way amid marauding tribes, lynch mobs and innumerable chases through the sand dunes on souped-up vehicles. There are moments that take your breath away but don't add up to pack in a wallop.

This script should have been released first. It would've elevated Fury Road... The dynamic here is reversed, though this is still a very good film.

Nothing could ever be Fury Road, but if you want the spectacle and a reason to go back to theaters this summer, this is a great one.

If Furiosa had been a standalone, it would be considered an incredible feat, but as the fifth instalment, it doesn’t evolve on the spectacle we’ve already seen in Fury Road.

A rapturous phoenix.

Furiosa doesn’t offer the same narrative purity, nor does it produce the same propulsive energy, that its predecessor did – but then, few movies have.

Miller says he storyboarded Furiosa before a single frame of Fury Road was filmed. That's hard to reconcile with FR's whiplash pacing and the former's languid running time. Furiosa is the longest Mad Max movie by a good 30 minutes, and didn't need to be.

With Furiosa, George Miller forges his protagonist’s sizzling, magma rage into a new blade that is remarkably unlike Fury Road…

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a beautiful spectacle. An action epic on a scale that we rarely see these days. I left the theater feeling overwhelmed with joy, adrenaline and dopamine pulsing through my system.

It’s a thrilling display of vehicular carnage and anarchy, but the film is most potent as an exploration of how psychologies are bent and broken in dysfunctional societies.